Fabulous: Python library for printing images and fancy text to the terminal | Hacker News Reader

Fabulous: Python library for printing images and fancy text to the terminal

lobstertech.com

105 pointstta14 comments

This is cool, but I get the feeling it is just a workaround for the broken state of current terminals. Why are they still character based? We have had bitmap displays as long as I have had a computer, but we still emulate text terminals.

There are graphical terminals in programs like Maple and Matlab, and some years ago there was talk of an XML-based terminal, but nothing happens.

Sorry for the rant. I just couldn't help my self.

There are some shells like that:

http://poshconsole.codeplex.com/

Windows only - WPF based Powershell console.

I think the simple reason is there are better tools for working with graphics. Text terminals were great, and are still immensely productive if you are proficient with the command-set. Even in a full-blown word processor, people have trouble laying out text along with graphics. It would simply turn out to be chaotic I fear.

Hmm, I've just tried it. It has potential, but it's very slow and sluggish on my machine (quad).

"XML-based terminal"

talk about a Heaven meets Hell scenario

It reminds me the famous libcaca:

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

One of my favorite application of the libcaca is neercs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQr42LjaNCY

Lobstertech: I couldn't help but be reminded of the fancy things we did with ANSI graphics in the BBS days. Merging the gif/jpg to ansi converter was very clever. This could make for some interesting terminal programs.

yeah this gives me flashbacks to the 80's

looks very cool, but running easy_install fabulous on Mac 10.5 installed a broken version. the demo threw some errors and the whole thing blinked and didn't show all the colors. blinking terminal....

might work if i build it myself and sort out the ld dependencies. anyway, still a cool project. not sure i'll ever have use for it...maybe for debug apps.

The library is complaining about not being able to find gcc. It'll still fall back to the pure-python code and work properly. I made a release this morning to make that error message a less noisy debug message.

As for the blinking lights, rxvt based terminals like Terminal.app only support 4-bit color. I'll be making a 0.2 release soon to automatically downgrade colors for these types of terminals.

Also Mac's Terminal app is only 16 color.

Not if you turn on ANSI color

It works a little better in iTerm, at least it shows more colors, but it still has the blinking problem.

On 10.6, it installs fine.

After hacking out the PIL check in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabulous-0.1.5-py2.6.egg/fabulous/{test,image}.py and fixing the imports to import Image, the demo runs okay.

Which is to say Terminal.app fails to render; when using xterm and X11 locally, or ssh-ing from Linux into OS X, 'fabulous' looks fine.

You can also install it via pip:

sudo pip install fabulous

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